a16z

According to The Block, the DeFi Education Fund, Paradigm, Uniswap, and a16z led the submission of an amicus brief supporting the legal challenge by the crypto industry against Illinois' Digital Asset Tax Act. Aave Labs, Chainlink Labs, Figment, Phantom, Hyperliquid Policy Center, Solana Policy Institute, Stand With Crypto, and others co-signed the brief.The brief argues that the law is overly broad, imposes unfavorable tax treatment on transactions involving blockchain technology, and fails to clearly distinguish between taxable digital asset businesses and software and network infrastructure that helps users trade independently. It is estimated that 2.64 million residents in Illinois hold digital assets, ranking fifth in the nation.The law was signed by Illinois Governor JB Pritzker in June 2026 and imposes a 0.2% tax on digital asset transactions, originally set to take effect in January 2027 but postponed to July 2027. The Blockchain Association, Crypto Council for Innovation, and The Digital Chamber had previously filed a lawsuit against Illinois regarding this matter.

According to on-chain analyst Ai Yi's monitoring, a16z affiliated entities have cumulatively deposited 148,100 HYPE to various exchanges in the past 16 hours, with a total value of 12.63 million USD and an average deposit price of 85.26 USD.Since October 30, this entity has cumulatively transferred 233,000 HYPE, worth over 20.6 million USD; if sold, it is expected to profit 1.141 million USD.

According to market news, a16z affiliated entities have deposited a total of approximately 32,860 HYPE into Gate, OKX, and Bybit.

According to exclusive reports from Axios Pro, sources say that the computing power trading platform Ornn is negotiating the third tranche of its Series A financing, which could value the computing power trading startup at over $1 billion. If the deal is finalized, Ornn will become the highest-valued startup in the field.This negotiation follows Ornn's completion of the second tranche of Series A financing at a valuation of $800 million, just about four months after it completed its seed round financing. In June of this year, Ornn completed a $33 million seed round financing led by a16z crypto.Ornn primarily builds financial infrastructure for AI computing power, connecting neocloud with the GPU computing power of data centers to buyers willing to sign short-term contracts, and publishes a computing power price index, which has been integrated into Bloomberg terminals. The Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) plans to launch contracts linked to the Ornn computing power price index, but has not yet received regulatory approval.

On October 31, Kyle Harrison, a general partner at the venture capital firm Contrary, stated that venture capital is experiencing a McDonaldization, where efficiency, measurability, predictability, and control lead to outcomes that are not intended by all parties. He believes the symptoms are scale combined with consensus, and the industry has split into different forms that share the same name. Harrison previously worked at Index Ventures, Coatue, and TCV, and founded the research platform Contrary Research. The article was published on the same day in his column.He cited PitchBook data indicating that in the first three quarters of 2026, a16z has raised $23.8 billion, accounting for over 20% of U.S. venture capital fundraising during the same period. During this time, U.S. venture capital funds raised a total of $108.5 billion, which is about 39% higher than the total for 2025. The number of first-time funds decreased from 479 in 2022 to 195 in 2025, with 81 so far this year; funds in their fourth round and beyond accounted for 88.2% of all fundraising, the highest share recorded by PitchBook.Harrison also wrote that the proportion of U.S. venture capital funding attributed to artificial intelligence rose from 39% in 2023 to 51% in 2024, 65% in 2025, and 82.7% so far in 2026. In the first quarter of this year, five companies—OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Waymo, and Databricks—captured 73.2% of U.S. deal value. Since 2023, non-AI venture capital in the U.S. has roughly maintained an annual range of $100 billion to $120 billion. He stated that once fund size dominates decision-making, every deal must fit the fund's scale.

According to on-chain analyst @ai_9684xtpa's monitoring, a16z affiliated entities have transferred 118,000 HYPE to Wintermute, Galaxy Digital, and Cumberland in batches since yesterday, valued at approximately 10.7 million dollars based on an average price of 90.72 dollars, with the specific use still unclear.

According to The Defiant, Uniswap, venture capital firm a16z, and the DeFi Education Fund (DEF) are appealing to the cryptocurrency tax regulations in Illinois, USA, seeking exemptions for decentralized finance activities.The aforementioned organizations argue that wallet withdrawals and cross-chain bridging should not be included in the tax assessment based on asset value, while also requesting the elimination of the requirement to maintain records of private keys.

a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen commented on the online programming platform Replit and its CEO Amjad Masad's proposed concept of Agent Habitat, believing that more companies will become autonomous driving companies as a result. He stated that the keyword pointed out by Masad is chaos, and quoted his viewpoint that most agents today operate in chat windows, personal accounts, and one-off scripts, holding credentials and data given to them by others, but no one decides what they can access, nor can anyone see what they have done.Andreessen noted that disruptive technologies like personal computers, spreadsheets, and email entered the workplace in a bottom-up chaotic manner, and only later did they require habitats to moderately constrain that chaos. He cited examples such as early employees bringing personal computers into the office, spreadsheets enabling non-programmers to create business models and forecasts, but also introducing hard-to-audit formula errors; email bypassed the information flow controlled by the mailroom in the past. He believes this kind of chaos indicates that employees are claiming tools that can bring alignment and significant productivity improvements.Andreessen also stated that code is the ultimate product of alignment, and expanding the range of code contributors will bring chaos, thus requiring a free-range style of agent habitat rather than cages, but it cannot be completely laissez-faire. He mentioned that an employee from Sumitomo Mitsui Finance and Leasing completed a development process originally planned to take 6 people 6 months in just one week. He indicated that for companies to become autonomous driving companies, they must achieve alignment, and in the future, the degree of alignment may be measured by the richness of the agent habitat; Replit and its clients have already understood this, while most companies have not yet grasped it.

The on-chain currency market Sixpence, aimed at tokenized U.S. stocks, will launch a points event on Robinhood Chain from October 26, 00:00 to November 23, 00:00 (UTC), with a total prize pool of 10,000 USDG, distributed in two phases of 5,000 USDG each.Sixpence allows users to borrow stablecoins using tokenized U.S. stocks such as AAPL, TSLA, NVDA as collateral, or to deposit stock tokens into the Vault to earn interest. The project has completed a $5 million seed round of financing, with investors including a16z CSX and others.

a16z recently submitted a public comment letter to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in response to the CFTC's request for comments on the listing of computing power derivative contracts, expressing support for establishing a regulated computing power derivatives market in the United States. The related derivatives would help AI startups and cloud service providers hedge against computing power price, utilization, and duration risks, and reduce the financing costs of AI infrastructure.a16z stated that the CFTC does not need new statutory authority, as the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA), Part 38 core principles, and Part 40 self-certification process are sufficient, and no new rules are needed prior to listing. The letter suggested that the CFTC rely on the existing regulatory framework to support the adoption of computing power price benchmarks that comply with the principles of the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO), and allow exchanges to launch cash-settled computing power futures, including fixed-term futures and perpetual contracts.a16z crypto is an investor in Ornn, and ICE announced in May plans to launch GPU computing power futures based on the Ornn Computing Power Price Index (OCPI).

The venture capital firm a16z released a chart weekly report written by Moses Sternstein on October 23, 2026. The report states that Netflix is still growing, with revenue growth slowing to just below about 12%, the lowest level since 2021 to 2022. The company is producing its own short videos and entering live sports. The report cites BCG data indicating that the upper limit of media consumption in the U.S. is about 26 hours per week, showing a moderate decline since the peak of lockdowns. Moses Sternstein: Competition comes not only from other streaming services but also from short videos, with much of the recent media growth coming from background consumption while driving or working.In terms of computing power, the report cites Ornn Data stating that the rental price of every GPU in the chart series is higher than at the beginning of the year, including the oldest A100, which is about 9% to 143% higher compared to a 6-year straight-line depreciation. Moses Sternstein: Over a longer period, older A100 and H100 GPUs spend more time below that line, but have only shown significant strength since April this year, making comparisons over a longer period not entirely fair. According to OpenRouter, token demand surged sharply in spring, jumped again after a brief plateau at the end of summer, with token consumption for both open-source and closed-source models still following an exponential path, and the share of proprietary models slightly increased last week. The author states that OpenRouter only covers a very small portion, and these indices are not perfect proxies for actual token spending and GPU pricing.In manufacturing, the report states that computer production capacity and utilization rates are rising, with production increases being larger. The increase in communication and semiconductor production mainly comes from expansion, while the price increase for electrical equipment is the largest, but domestic production has slightly declined. The import increase of key categories of AI capital expenditures mentioned above far exceeds the domestic production increase in dollar terms. According to ADP, the increase in average weekly hours for industries related to AI construction is greater than that of other industries, and is generally greater than the net increase in personnel. Job switchers in manufacturing have about a 5 percentage point wage growth premium compared to stayers. Cybersecurity stocks remain strong in IGV this year, but have seen a larger pullback than the market since October. The revenue growth rate of large companies has mostly only increased by a few percentage points, with some experiencing declines, and stock price performance reaching up to about 125%, with Palo Alto Networks' revenue growth largely driven by acquisitions.

The venture capital firm a16z published comments from co-founder Marc Andreessen on X regarding open-source AI. Marc Andreessen: If the only way for children to learn AI is to work at one or two companies, it would be hard for parents to accept.He also stated that in an open-source world, every child can understand how the relevant technology works. Without open-source, AI will inevitably be concentrated in one or two companies, or even directly in the hands of the government.Marc Andreessen also used the analogy of "government sushi," asking people to imagine "government AI," and stated that open-source is a safeguard to ensure this scenario does not become a reality in the future.

a16z Frontier founding partner Chris Dixon stated that early Web2 platforms were built on fragile tacit agreements: independent creators, bloggers, news media, and community volunteers contributed high-quality content for free, while platforms provided traffic distribution, audience accumulation, and commercial revenue opportunities.He pointed out that after forming a monopoly through network effects, platforms continuously tightened algorithms, forcing creators to pay for traffic. With the advent of the generative AI era, large model companies collect long-accumulated content from the entire internet through crawlers and directly provide answers in search and Q&A interfaces, no longer diverting traffic to the original websites, thus severing the economic cycle of independent creators.Dixon believes that if this trend continues, high-quality original content may be depleted, and the internet could be flooded with low-quality machine-generated content. He proposed that verifiable data ownership could be established through blockchain protocols, allowing data calls, reasoning, and training to be traceable and automatically receive economic returns. Reshaping this contract is one of the important missions of the Frontier fund.